What’s the big deal about Tulsa?
What makes Tulsa significant than any other city?
Well, you’ve come to a place where not only a terrorist attack occurred,
but that terrorist attack
there was no justice that followed that terrorist attack.
And certainly there is not a more clear example
of a space where reparations is indeed needed
than the Greenwood community here in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
The whole world is watching Tulsa, right?
What happened in Greenwood is being made known all over the world.
In June 2020,
Human Rights Watch went to Tulsa, Oklahoma
to support our community partners
and to celebrate Juneteenth
which marks the day enslaved people were declared free in the US.
The event was held in Tulsa’s historic Greenwood district,
the home of what once was a thriving, wealthy Black community.
Greenwood was destroyed in 1921
in one of worst cases of racial violence in the history of the US.
I stand here today
only because of the resolve of my ancestors
the unrelinquishing strength of my Tulsa family and friends
and the possibilities that we can break from the chains of injustice.
I was born here in Tulsa.
My parents were patrons of Mount Zion
which is often pictured in smoldering flames
as a result of the targeted and vile racist destruction
of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre.
When I hear my family, my predecessors talk about what Greenwood was like
I have to literally close my eyes so that I can imagine it.
We’re talking about a four-square-mile area
where it’s like a metropolis.
Greenwood was a Black community who had shared principles
shared values, who loved each other
who helped each other
and that’s what really kept them thriving.
On May 31, 1921 a white mob invaded Greenwood,
after a young Black man was falsely accused of assaulting a white woman.
The mob attacked Black residents and businesses,
burning down the 35 square blocks of the district in under 24 hours,
looting and destroying over 1,200 homes,
a dozen churches, and over 60 businesses.
I guess I might have been five, guess, I don’t know.
Very small.
I remember men coming to the house. They were white men.
I don’t know what they called themselves.
Ku Klux Klan or what they called themselves but coming in
and destroying the people’s homes and burning them down.
I heard people screaming and saw people running
and hollering and trying to get out of the way.
About 300 people were killed
the vast majority of them Black. And thousands of Black people
were left homeless.
Property damage claims from the time
amount to tens of millions in today’s dollars.
As a descendant of a survivor from the Tulsa Race Massacre,
I see my people who left and fled Tulsa in me.
They lost everything. They lost their homes, their dignity, the hope, right?
The hope that came with them out of chattel slavery.
That hope was destroyed in one night.
Because the city called this a riot
and blamed the Blacks, African-Americans, my people.
We couldn't collect on our insurance claims.
And we know for a fact that the Black people in Greenwood couldn’t get a fair hearing.
Right? We know that.
The people that they were going to go in front of burnt them down.
A state government commission investigating the Tulsa Race Massacre
confirmed in a 2001 report that Tulsa officials
and the hundreds of white people they deputized participated in the violence
by looting, killing, and destroying property.
No one was ever prosecuted or punished for these violent crimes.
We know that the city of Tulsa and the state of Oklahoma
had a conspiracy of silence about what actually happened.
I mean I went to school, right on this street, right on Greenwood
and didn’t know anything about it until 1997, 1998.
And so, all the attention that’s now coming to Greenwood
is something that I’ve always said,
“If we say their names enough,
the bones will rattle the earth and people will hear it.”
In the summer of 2020, the city of Tulsa
finally began excavations for mass graves from 1921,
exploring areas where eyewitnesses say Black bodies were buried.
Neither the city nor the state has provided reparations
in the form of compensation to the survivors and descendants of the massacre
as recommended by the 2001 Commission
or to the broader Black community in Tulsa.
We know of three remaining survivors who are all over 100 years old
so providing repair is urgent.
What are reparations?
The root word means “to repair.” It’s very simple.
We need to repair the damage that was done
not just in 1921
but the continual massacre that has happened ever since that day.
Even after the tremendous losses the Black community suffered due to the massacre,
government officials committed no public money to help Greenwood rebuild.
After the massacre, they rebuilt by 1925
and they did that in the face of white supremacy, Jane and Jim Crow
and in the face of the very people
who bombed and looted and destroyed and murdered blocks of a community.
At its height, the Greenwood District was 35 square blocks.
In the 30’s, parts of Greenwood were redlined
meaning agencies designated it as high risk for lenders.
Urban renewal led to the building of highways through the district
displacing Black families.
Then authorities built OSU-Tulsa
and Oneok Field, a minor league baseball stadium in the historic district of Greenwood.
Today, gentrification is now encroaching on Greenwood
leaving just a small triangular area south of the highway.
Yet, neither the survivors and descendants of the Tulsa Massacre
nor the broader Black community in Tulsa
got a meaningful share of the wealth.
Urban removal...
the government calls it urban renewal,
I call it urban removal, came through this community
like they did in so many other Black communities
and literally destroyed Greenwood.
Each time, they were denied an opportunity to create some generational wealth.
And so our families don’t know the same generational wealth
that they knew in Greenwood.
100 years after the Tulsa Race Massacre
the city remains highly segregated with most Black people living in North Tulsa.
In 2019, Human Rights Watch analyzed data
around policing, poverty, and racial inequality in the city.
We found that Black Tulsans are twice as likely to be unemployed
and the Black poverty rate is 35%.
Some neighborhoods that are predominately Black are subject to more aggressive policing
experiencing police stops at more than four times the rate of low-income white neighborhoods
and at 20 or more times the rate of wealthy white neighborhoods.
And I can't help but reflect back on this very ground that we're standing
what my great-grandmother, Rebecca Brown Crutcher went through
as she had to flee and fight for that same right to live
in the midst of racial terror violence.
I can't help but think about that continual trauma
that's been passed down my family line
you know, fast-forwarding to 2016 with my brother.
Mike, I’m gonna hit the recorder.
This guy’s still walking.
And isn’t following commands.
Time for taser I think.
Police officers running when he was innocent, needing help.
Got a feeling that’s about to happen.
That looks like a bad dude too.
Could be on something.
Shots fired!
We’re still fighting to run outside.
We’re still fighting just to sit on our sofa and eat ice cream,
or play video games with our nephew or birdwatch.
Our outside isn’t free.
We’re fighting just to be Black in America.
And I believe that Tulsa is the microcosm of a broader issue
that we’re facing all over this nation.
And if we can get it right here
I believe we can get it right everywhere.
Many cities, states and institutions across the US
are attempting to come to terms with their racist past and present
with local forms of reparations.
Rosewood, Florida; Evanston, Illinois
and the state of California are justa few places that have taken steps
to address the inequalities brought on by systemic anti-Black discrimination.
Human Rights Watch has long been supportive of reparations by the federal government
to account for the brutality of slavery
and subsequent racist laws and institutions.
In February 2021,
I testified in front of US Congress
about HR 40, a bill that explores
a pathway to federal reparations.
If racial justice is ever to be achieved,
repair needs to be a part of the equation.
With mounting pressure from the public to address systemic racism
the House Judiciary Committee held a vote on HR 40 and approved it.
This offers new hope that an opportunity
for racial healing will finally happen in the US.
I don’t believe we can have a conversation about moving forward as a country
if we don’t have a conversation rooted in the truth
of what has not been repaired
in terms of this country’s treatment and usage of African-American labor
of African-American minds and frankly, and mostly of African-American bodies.
Give my people back land, give my people money
that our ancestors built this country
built these corporations off their blood, sweat, tears, agony.
Pay them for that.
Give us good policies to operate within this system.
And I believe that the Covid-19 break,
coupled with what happened to George Floyd,
opened up an opportunity that we can finally get to the root of all the disparities,
the inequality and the discrimination which is anti-Black white supremacy.
The very fact that reparations if they ever did it, would be given,
will give a sense of hope and optimism
that this country that I’ve loved for so long,
finally loves me back.
Hands up! Don’t shoot! Hands up! Don’t shoot!